Benita Sampedro Vizcaya
Hofstra University

The title of this essay capitalizes on the inherent “tensions between the commonly cited homophones” (Wilson, Sandru and Welsh 3)1 routes and roots, rutas y raíces, in an attempt to exponentially multiply the semantic potential of the ruin. Of course, the use of this trope is not completely new,2 but it is fundamentally relevant and pertinent here, for it posits the intimate relation between space and time, between history and place, and it is conducive to a historiography that alters the conventional linear models of colonial and modern conceptions of progress. Ruins, rust, and remnants, for their part, are a privileged space for questioning the past (colonial or not) as well as the present, and a propitious locus for interrogating disciplinary purposes and practices. I will argue that ghost-like villages and vacuumed-like empty islands can be as eloquent about the past as archives—as we commonly understand them—statistics, and libraries. They speak of the politics and experience of abandonment, and they are “endowed with a capacity to penetrate our sensibility” (González-Ruibal 2005: 144) –and eventually move us to action— that other kinds of data may lack. The metonymic relevance of the ruin is fully activated by the fact that we are left with only material fragments to work with, fragmented lives, narratives and chronologies, and always fragmentary and partial written records. Ruins, as alternative archives in and of themselves, alter the sites of official documentation, shifting the focus of the political, military, and other manifestations of power.3 Equally, they are evocative enough to alter narrative conventions, questioning traditional empiricism as the legitimate practice par excellence; exploring, instead, new methodological horizons and affiliative forms of connecting the past with the present, and the researchers’ involvement with both.

The ‘routes’ of my title, meanwhile, are intended to suggest interventions, both tangible and intangible. The phrase ‘routes to ruin’ ultimately has a performative role at a rhetorical junction: it refers to a recent journey—my own and that of my fellow researchers—across boundaries to the direct encounter with time, place, community, and ruins. A journey, in short, through the “landscapes of abjection” (González-Ruibal 2006: 180). The route in question took us to the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, and we landed at the coastal areas of the estuary region of Río Muni, in the triangular zone between the communities of Cabo San Juan and the islands of Elobey Grande, Elobey Chico and Corisco, all once relevant for the West. It is a region that, for the purposes of this interrogation, can be best described as a strategic signifier, one that mimics and mirrors its relevance as a geopolitical, religious, and economic nexus between another triangle—Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—for several centuries before these ruins came to be.

The door through which this triangular region entered modernity is a threshold repeatedly crossed by collective displacement and suffering. Endless ruins and rhetorical mausolea speak compellingly of commercial and colonial plunder, and cumulative dislocations. Ruins and remains tell us that these land- and sea-scapes have repeatedly been re-routed: first by the Portuguese, as far back as the fifteenth century, to be followed in the adventure—long before the Spanish intervention—by the Dutch. The Francoist geographer Abelardo de Unzueta, writing in the 1940s, speculates about the seventeenth-century origins of a ruined fort he encounters:

En el referido mapa de Iradier figuran en la costa fronteriza al Continente las ruinas de un fuerte holandés, que hace suponer sea de la época en que Holanda, aprovechando las luchas de Portugal con la España de Felipe II para lograr su separación, ocupó de 1642 a 1648 sus posesiones de la costa de Guinea hasta Loango y las islas, estableciendo en Corisco el centro comercial de la trata de esclavos (Unzueta 36).

It is, nonetheless, a well-established fact that through this triangular region of the Muni estuary vast quantities of merchandise were transported: commodities both human and material, conflated even in the language of the scholar: “afluían los cargamentos de ébano humano, camino de Corisco, para de allí ser transportados a las Américas” (Unzueta 37). After 1648, the “Compañía de Corisco, que comerciaba en ébano negro, establece su sede en la isla de su nombre, extendiendo su jurisdicción por la costa y tierra adentro comprendida entre el río Camarones y Cabo López” (Unzueta 71). This was a monopoly that Spain had to dispute fiercely, not only with the Dutch, but also with the Portuguese and the British. Its share was nonetheless very considerable: “siendo visitadas estas zonas por más de cien buques españoles con una tripulación de cerca de 2.000 hombres” (Unzueta 72). As for the geostrategic positioning of Elobey, Unzueta introduces a striking synecdoche:

semejaba una gran factoría natural anclada a escasa distancia de la costa, perfectamente a cubierto de cualquier contingencia, no reuniendo el litoral de entonces estas valiosas condiciones de seguridad y facilidades comerciales (Unzueta 42).

Despite the new antislavery laws of the early nineteenth century, put in place, the Gulf of Guinea experiences a new phase of exploitation. This was, more specifically, an era of expanding maritime commerce, and neither the Germans nor the British delayed their arrival to the region. The commercial houses of the Woermann Company, E. H. Moritz, Lieb & Friedrich, John Holt, and Hatton & Coockson, among others, established their factorías in Corisco, Elobey, and along the Muni estuary. The Compañía Transatlántica, trafficking between the region and Valencia and Barcelona, emerged into the picture in the 1880s. The material remains leave no doubt that throughout the nineteenth century, islands and coastal areas were intimately linked to business decisions taken at the commercial offices in Liverpool, London and Hamburg, as well as to the commercial demands of those urban European capitals. The Woermann Company, founded in Hamburg in 1837,4to give just one example, had business establishments all along the Central West coast of Africa, and was perhaps the most influential of all in the Gulf of Guinea for a sustained period of time. It has been accredited in local oral narratives of the Benga people with having made the bulk of its fortune in the island of Elobey, where part of its naval fleet was stationed.5

The commercial impetus was maintained throughout the later nineteenth century. The 1859 economic reports indicate that there was “un movimiento anual de quince a dieciséis buques de nacionalidad inglesa y americana, que realizaban un activo comercio de exportación de palo tintóreo, marfil, ébano” and other products, according to Uzueta (43). All transactions were done by barter: from England and Germany arrived manufactured products, often encouraging dependency in the local communities: weapons, knifes, munitions, textiles, tobacco, and, the most habit-forming commodity of all, liquor,6 were all brought in exchange for ivory, palm oil, rubber, and an almost unlimited amount of fine woods such as mahogany, ebony and okume. Modernity typically arrived for the citizens of these islands in an unglamorous and unflattering guise. The anecdote, profusely quoted by historians and ethnographers of the colonial period, of the chief of Cabo San Juan who displayed at his hut a European-made door with the initials W.C.—evidently rescued from a shipwreck—allowed the easy assertion of Western superiority and sophistication, an aggressive condescension, with little acknowledgement of what this gesture of appropriation might have meant for the local Benga inhabitants. The nuances of collaboration or resistance that might have intervened in the episode are silenced by the chroniclers.

Elobey served as a site of systematic intervention, of active colonization, for generations of explorers and missionaries: a stepping point for the conquest of the continent. The Basque explorer Manuel Iradier Bulfy arrived in 1875, fashioning himself after Henry Morton Stanley, and used the island as his base.7 In December of that year he describes it as:

Una verdadera población con magníficos y confortables edificios, multitud de dependencias, jardines y caminos, fraguas y talleres siempre en movimiento y un buen varadero destinado a reponer las averías de los muchos vaporcitos que poseen dichas Compañías (cited in Unzueta 45).

In their wake arrived the missionaries: first Presbiterians and then the Claretian Catholic order, which would long attempt to maintain exclusive sovereignty. In 1885 the respective missions, churches and boarding school houses for boys were simultaneously inaugurated in Cabo San Juan, Elobey, and Corisco, a new, religious, triangle from which to advance into the continent:

Fruto de la labor misional española es la confección de un catecismo en lengua benga, una gramática de este idioma y la construcción de una casa-misión amplia, bella y confortable, con espaciosas galerías y salones y una iglesia también de mampostería de 28 metros de larga por 12 de alta y otros 12 metros aproximadamente de anchura (Unzueta 80)

The tiny island of Elobey was the seat of the government of the region, “llave del gran estuario del Muni”, for a period of over forty years, between 1885 and 1927.

Today, the archaeological traces of rampant modernity are visible everywhere: rotten cannons and remains of military outposts, the German-made batteries—left behind—of the also-German-made lighthouse machine, industrial ruins of agricultural processing plants, abandoned sawmills, warehouses, administrative spaces, entire villages, roads, clinics, wells… All remains of living, working, and social spaces, are uprooted by the jungle. It is as if, “In every case, we are dealing with the metonymical power of dead material culture” (González-Ruibal 2005: 144). At a more domestic level, we find: rusted Singer sowing machines in abandoned homes, a crib in a baby’s bedroom, a fountain in the all-girls boarding house of the Conceptionist mission, two majestic columns at the entrance doorway of an import/export warehouse, the stair case and banisters of an elegant residence, a large art deco window from the former master bedroom of the Woermann company director, shards of pottery and ceramics, a kaolin pipe, and numberless discarded bottles of liquor of varied European origin. These are all abandoned artifacts and structures that “convey emotions and haunt from a dark past with a message of caution,” as Alfredo González-Ruibal—the lead archaeologist in our team—has written (2005: 144). This dark past is characterized not least by gender exploitation.  Life stories unveiled, in interviews with women in their sixties and seventies, are threaded through with the image of the corisqueñas as an inexhaustible harem of concubines, miningas in the local colonial parlance. Their stories speak of miscegenation, of children that grew up without ever meeting their (white) fathers, of women eternally at the disposal of their capricious European partners, personal experiences of subjugation.

 

 

The places—or, rather, spaces—in which we encountered the women and men of Elobey, Corisco, and Cabo San Juan, bear continued witness to the experience of large-scale exile, migration, depopulation, alienation, dispossession, illness, alcoholism, and deprivation of educational and health resources. In the remainder of my presentation, I would like to revisit two concrete sets of ruins: those of a palm oil processing factory of the Sociedad Colonial de Guinea (SOCOGUI), at Cabo San Juan, and those of the Misión Claretiana, on the island of Corisco.

The SOCOGUI at Cabo San Juan

Under an all-encompassing avenue of trees (known as Igombegombe), on the diffuse margins between beach, vegetation, and the villages of Cabo San Juan, a lady perhaps in her sixties approaches and asks: “¿Has venido para reconstruir la fábrica?,” “¿Vienen los blancos otra vez?.” The questions are perplexing, multilayered. I was certainly not there to rebuild colonial relations, or the factory itself for that matter. But then, what have we –our research team—come for? And what do we intend to re-build? Needless to say, people’s relations with the past, and with ruins, are complex. For some people in the villages, the now run-down factory, once a flourishing, state-of-the-art palm oil processing plant, continues to evoke—in some dislocating and disturbing way—memories of the colonial order, ambivalent recollections of the past. Its rusted pipes, torn-down laboratory, rail and navigation networks, all derailed or sunken, bear testimony to the colonial enterprise. Ruins of the old regime, they are a shattered mirror of colonial production, power, modernity, and subjugation. They are mirrors, also, to a community (and, by extension, a country) that after the coming of independence in 1968 saw its own political aspirations turned to ruin, rust, and abandonment, under the eleven-year-long dictatorship of Francisco Macías Nguema (1968-1979). This political implosion—closely associated with the colonial legacy and the imperial enterprise as a whole—complicates matters exponentially when negotiating colonial memory.

In walking today though the villages once established around the 30-kilometer extension of the palm tree plantation that surrounded the factory, we see nothing but dilapidated shacks, a shabby, dispersed community of the once-laboring poor, a despoiled landscape condemned for years to come. It is amidst these deteriorated dwellings that the lady, perhaps once an employee of the factory, formulates her question, a question that forces me—and us—to interrogate her past, the factory’s past, Europe’s past, and, in the end, our intellectual responsibility in regard to that past, which indeed has not passed. Frederick Cooper reminds us that in Africa the encounters of the past are very much part of the present8 and, although I am fully aware that the concept of “Africa” as a totalizing unity is as much a fallacy as it is a site of multiple enunciations, Cooper’s remark might indeed be timely here. Furthermore, the complex interrelation between history and the present provides the terrain on which, by definition, colonial discourse analysis always operates.

With the arrival of the palm oil factory in Cabo San Juan first came deforestation, then plantation, and then exploitation, followed closely by industrialization, deterritorialization, Christianization, the reordering of land and labor, and the new redesigning of the region in accordance with European ethics, modernity, and a new world order; that of the European industrial era. This, with the caveat that neither the order nor the sequence are fixed, for most of the conditions overlap anyway. Of course, the myth of the empty and virginal land is implicitly inscribed in this narrative as well; in fact it precedes it, and even perhaps preempts it, alongside other well-traveled myths, such as that of the paradise discourse, which also makes its appearance immediately before penetration, and maintains an almost infallible causality effect with the destructive dynamics of plantation, imperialism, and global capitalism, a topic that Sharae Deckard (2009) has explored convincingly in her recent book, and that she renames as ‘exploiting Eden’.

The palm oil factory, under the ownership of the Sociedad Colonial de Guinea, was established in 1921 by León Ururquiza Arana. While the region is credited with the strategic conditions and historic traditions for the triangular trade with Europe and the Americas, it should also be noted that: “The economic geography of colonization is as uneven as the geography of power. Colonial powers established islands of cash-crop production (…) surrounded by vast labor catchment areas in which coercion and, as time went on, lack of alternatives were necessary to extract laborers” (Cooper 2003: 30-31). Mahogany, ebony, and primarily the coveted okume trees, proverbial for their height as they reached as much as 60 meters, began to be ferried by large transnational ships towards the markets in Europe. A sumptuous two-story building—between art deco and colonial tropical style—was erected on the right hand side of the Río Ñaño for the company managers and executives. Local residents still recall it as “la casa blanca de la SOCOGUI”, although nothing but a column, standing against the river, remains on the site today. Other established infrastructures, on the left hand side of the river, included the timber yard and warehouse, houses for the workers, a school and infirmary equipped with operating room and pharmacy, a few kilometers of rail road to connect the important collection points of the plantation, and a harbor. Naturally this was supplemented by a fleet of steam (later diesel) trains and locomotive systems, and boats. 9 Trains traveling through open fields, or carving a space through the jungle, and boats thirstily awaiting their shipment at the bay were a ubiquitous symbol of dynamism and progress, embodying a metanarrative of speed, development, and modernization (MacClintock 302). It is precisely this interconnectivity between transportation networks that makes the production system in the colonial setting fully transnational.

 

 

The palm oil factory was active in the production of palm oil as motor and machinery lubricant; in the refinery of palm oil for cosmetics and soap and, on a minor scale, in the processing of palm oil for the food industry. It remained so until shortly after Equatorial Guinea’s independence, in March 1969, when all colonial companies, western official administrators and security forces, landowners, operations personnel, store-keepers and traders, left in a virtual stampede from all corners of the country, after the first signs of threat from the new government of Francisco Macías Nguema. Meanwhile, Guinean timber was instrumental for the construction of boats, and later planes, as well as for furniture, housing, and railways. The assembling of the RENFE railway system through peninsular Spain was made possible during the desarrollista period of the 1950s and 60s, under the Franco regime, with the okume trees from the Gulf of Guinea. These commercial products contributed, in more ways than we can easily perceive, to reinforcing the connection between domesticity and empire, and between the colonial setting and the industrial market. Huge ships loaded with portable domestic and commercial commodities loaded their trade from the colonial markets of Africa to the commercial harbors of Europe, overflowing with new commodities essential to industrial modernity (MacClintock 210).

The impoverishment of the land—transformed by massive industrial exploitation, with the correspondingly radical alteration of the ecosystem, as well as the elimination of the subsistence agricultural and fishing economy—is one of several long-lasting tolls the original communities would have had to pay. Father Tomás Pujadas, from the Claretianos religious order, toured the region of Cabo San Juan, Elobey and Corisco in 1983. What follows is his rendition of the villages of Itembue and Igombegombe, where the ruins of the mission stand today:

A su sombra viven todas aquellas pobres gentes, y en medio de un cristianismo medio deformado, creen, esperan, aman. Y así, como en el interior de aquellos parajes, hoy yermos y solitarios, no se borrará fácilmente la huella del europeo que taló sus bosques llevándose una inmensa riqueza forestal (217).

Commenting on the state of the industrial landscape, more than a decade after the repatriation of the westerners operating it, Father Pujadas writes of the site of the palm oil installations:

Sus edificios veían espantados cómo iba creciendo a su alrededor el bikoro deseoso de vengar aquel amplio solar arrebatado por la civilización a los copudos y gigantescos árboles del bosque. La selva no perdona (223).

We cannot help but to be reminded of Walter Benjamin’s well-known statement that, “In the ruin, history has physically merged with the setting” (cited in Xinyu 132).

The Corisco Mission

Ruins, as we have already begun to see, are also an interesting point of departure for addressing the way in which individuals and communities deal with memory and personal biographies through abandoned material buildings. The incident I am about to present is closely bound by collective memory, narrative, time, evidence, decay, materiality, and politics. Without exception, all inhabitants of the island of Corisco above the age of seventy recall an event with vivid detail, as if it happened yesterday… and the event goes like this… On a late afternoon in the month of April, some time during the 1940s –they recall—10 a fire of unprecedented magnitude burned to the ground the grandiose buildings of the Claretian Mission, church, and house on the island of Corisco. It was a day of absolute horror in the island, flames falling from the sky; the fire could not be contained, although all the children at the boarding school were safely rescued. They recall, too, the man held responsible for the fire: his name was Father Andrés Bravo. The priest, they maintain, wanted to clean up the courtyard by setting fire to the large pile of coco bark before the upcoming Easter celebrations: the coconut market was indeed a big business for the Claretians at that time. The same night of the fire, Father Bravo would hurry to the shore to get on board and leave the island, never to return. One intriguing aspect of this incident today is that not a single citizen of the entire island of Corisco has been able to provide the date and the year of the event. It is as if  “a self-addressed memoricide” (González-Ruibal 2005: 131) has been committed: by bringing forgetfulness to their recent history, they erase one version of it, to produce another. The case suggests a complex attitude towards religion, language, race, power, and ruins, as useful icons of temporality that, in the words of Alfredo González-Ruibal, “allow the past to be modified through altering its materiality” (2005: 131). Brutal repression and exploitation in the decades following the event helped to shape the politics of forgetting; new forms of repression in the present day generate a combination of amnesia and nostalgia closely associated with political disempowerment. Despite its architectural dimensions, the ruins of the Corisco Mission evoke, for the islanders, an uneasy—and elusive—combination of responses: a desire for demonumentalization, an erasure of their unpleasant past, alongside a vestigial sense of attachment to the ruins: a conflicted affiliation with the memory of Spanish colonization, as they drift into an uncertain future.

 

 

At the end of the route

It is probably not necessary, at this point, to state that my own attachment to ruins is driven not by a Baroque meditation on worldly vanitas, nor by a romantic mourning for a lost past, and least of all by a nostalgic colonial impulse. Rather, it expresses my own affiliative networks. It responds to an ethical imperative that draws us, as a specific research team, and as the much broader collective of scholars invested in the subject and region, to these ruins and ultimately to this continent: what Kwaro Larby Korang has described as “a genuine investment in, and self-willed and committed political-ideological bonds with, the geopolitical, the social, and popular entity called ‘Africa’” (25).

The presence of the ruins, where the palm oil factory’s worker spoke to me, and their qualified absence, after the memoricide, compels us to respond to the demands of the time, bound and haunted by the colonial past. The islands and region of the Muni estuary have proven to be the scene, successively, first of criminal intervention, then of criminal non-intervention in the last few decades. Each has left its scars. Each has left its own forms of emptiness, its confused and disoriented cultural shapes, its false expectations. As we look to the future, a brand new airport that traverses the island of Corisco has just been inaugurated on 12 October, 2011, its landing strips running from north to south, from coast to coast, with the linear precision of a ruler. But it would be ingenuous to believe that the current generation of Corisco citizens will benefit from it. If I have advocated here for a politically engaged disciplinary practice, entangled with issues of ethnicity, gender, power, and inequality, these issues—and the immaterial structures of conflict, oppression, and destruction within which they operate—remain active, while their precursors lie in ruins. If the role of the researcher is useful, not just as one ivory-tower exercise among many, but as a concrete means of addressing ongoing forms of injustice, we should continue to reflect—as I do—on a question which was posed when we, the group of researchers, interviewed the children of Corisco’s only elementary school. What was their reaction to our project, we asked. To which question a ten year old-boy responded: “¿y cómo me sirve a mí eso?.” Any answer must surely involve the conviction that our agenda has to engage with the present as much as with the past: it has to take into account issues of relevance to the community’s survival. Our work as researchers can be put at the service of others –in this case the people of Corisco— to help though narration in processes of restoration, interpretation, intervention, and liberation. “The problem with narration as the privileged means of mediation is that it has led us to overlook other possible modes of engagement with the materiality of the recent past. We need alternative ways of translating the remains from the past” Alfredo González-Ruibal remarked (2008: 250). But ruins have their limitations too: working with material remains and oral histories to set the date of the fire at the Corisco Mission we realize that they are not easily reducible to textuality; they render themselves resistant to recording and calendaric conventions as commonly understood by the west. If the methodological issues at stake are complex, what is clear is that writing the story can certainly be both “an epistemic and an ethical imperative” (González-Ruibal 2008: 245). “Acting as witnesses, bearing testimony of what has happened and is happening” (González-Ruibal 2009: 138) is an uncomfortable and yet necessary activity. In pursuing this path, we might continue to ask: how can our research invest the local community with agency, avoid victimization, and challenge accepted concepts of cooperation and progress?

Notes

* Part of the research involved in this project was made possible by a collective research grant received from the AECID and the Ministerio de Cultura of Spain for a project entitled “Making History and Empowering Local Communities in the Muni Estuary (Equatorial Guinea): An Archaeological Intervention in the Island of Corisco”. I would like to express my gratitude to Alfredo González-Ruibal, Alba Valenciano Mañé and Llorenç Picornell Gelabert for inviting me to be involved in this project and for their many insightful conversations on the subject. I am also grateful to Pablo Guerra for his invitation to present the work at a roundtable at the Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, and the Theory Group, at CUNY-Graduate Center in December 2011, and to the participants at the roundtable for their thoughtful feedback.

1 For a recent discussion of the coined phrase ‘route to ruin’ see the introduction to Rerouting the Postcolonial, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh.

2 “Kamau Brathwaite has been interrogating them, creatively and critically, for at least forty years” (Wilson, Sandru and Welsh 3).

3 For Dipesh Chakrabarty different archives open up “the possibility of a politics and project of alliance between the dominant metropolitan histories and the subaltern peripheral pasts,” a project that he baptized as provincializing Europe (42).

4 “La casa comercial naviera Woermann, fundada el 1 de octubre de 1837 en Hamburgo, dispuso de una flota de vapores con base en la isla de Elobey” (Copeiro 169).

5 “Los vapores alemanes de la Woermann Linie y Hamburg Afrika Linie eran buques de gran cabida, equipados especialmente para la estiba de madera y con la ayuda de dos lanchas que llevaban consigo cargaban unas trescientas trozas diarias” (Copeiro 169).

6 For the impact of alcohol import on local communities see the incisive study by Josep María Perlasia i Botey (2009).

7 “utilizó la isla como base y descanso de sus expediciones a Cabo San Juan, Muni, y otros afluentes” (Copeiro 167).

8 He specifically points out that “colonial situations cannot be bounded in either time or place, that they are fundamental to any history of the present” (2005: 34).

9 For a reconstructive history of the railroads and locomotive systems in Equatorial Guinea throughout the twentieth century see the well-illustrated study, with numerous period photographs, by Jesús Ramírez Copeiro del Villar (2007).

10 As recorded in the Claretian publication La Guinea española, the event took place on April 10, 1948.

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